1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to content transmission/reception, and in particular, to suspending and resuming content transmission/reception.
2. Description of the Background Art
In a related art, while data e.g., a content is delivered to a terminal, the delivery of the content is interrupted for some reasons, for instance, a priority of a reception of the content by the terminal becomes low due to an incoming voice call and thusly the content delivery is interrupted, a server which is transmitting the content may not know about this interruption. Under such a situation, the server continues to unnecessarily maintain the content delivery, thus to waste network resources.
In addition, even though a user of the terminal wants to suspend the content delivery, since there is no proper procedure for the server to suspend the data delivery, the terminal cannot notify such to the server. Accordingly, the server does not know for what reason the content delivery has been suspended, and the server unnecessary attempts to re-transmit the content.
Besides, since there is no proper procedure, the terminal generally discards all contents, including even a portion which had been successfully downloaded. Accordingly, even though the terminal desires to re-download the  content some time later, it inevitably downloads the entire of the content again, thereby wasting the network resources and increasing a cost.
Further, from the perspective of an internal construction of the terminal, the terminal includes a reception part and an upper application part. Here, the reception part of the terminal has successfully received the content from the server and informed the server about this. In a state that the content is not yet delivered to the application part, if the content delivery is interrupted for an unexpected reason, the application discards all of the contents since the content is incomplete. However, the server acknowledges that the terminal has successfully received all of the contents. Accordingly, some time later, even though the terminal requests a retransmission of only a part which failed to receive, the server cannot manage appropriately.